Effective software development and delivery

Choosing An Agile Scaling Framework

Building on the success of the Agile movement, companies have been keen to extend team-level methods such as Scrum to the enterprise. In the past few years, several Agile scaling frameworks and similar products have emerged.

But choosing the appropriate scaling framework for your organization is no easy task. The underlying principles and the organizational issues addressed by the various frameworks overlap. Each has a particular emphasis, and may or may not be a fit for your situation.

All are competing for your business, and to distinguish themselves from the competition they often resort to excessive, confusing, or negative marketing. This only makes it even harder to understand exactly what each framework is offering.

To muddy the waters still further, most of these frameworks have training and certifications associated with them. Individuals can become certified with little or no experience in applying Agile methods at scale (or at all). They sometimes give questionable advice.

As companies have experimented with one or more of these frameworks, they have achieved mixed results. Many people now approach the question of choosing a framework with negative preconceptions based on unfavorable outcomes in their early attempts to use a framework.

This short ebook offers some background information about which frameworks are viable and which are copycats, where some of the negative marketing phrases originated (and how little they actually mean), and connects common business objectives with the strengths of each framework.

The ebook also reviews the lessons learned over decades of information technology work that has led to the values and principles on which Agile (and related) methods are based. Without a clear understanding of these issues, managers often attempt to apply an Agile framework using a traditional mentality. That turns out to be the root cause of many of the “We tried X and it didn’t work” stories that are rampant in the industry. My hope is this little ebook will help you write a new story along the lines of “We tried X and it did work.”